A World at Arms (5 page)

OF Official File. A segment of the files at the Roosevelt Library.

PRO Public Record Office. The main British depository. All those cited are located in the new building in Kew. The letters and first number following PRO constitute the “Class” of the file and are followed, after a slash, by the folder number.

PSF President’s Secretary’s File. A segment of the files at the Roosevelt Library.

RG Record Group. The designation of major segments of the holdings of the U.S. National Archives.

St.S. Staatssekretär. State-Secretary, used in designating citations from that part of the German Foreign Ministry archive called the Büro Staatssekretär.

TMWC Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal,
42 vols. (Nürnberg: The Tribunal, 1946-48).

USSBS United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Used for the author of publications emanating from this agency.

U.St.S. Unterstaatssekretär. Special title of the head of the political division of the German Foreign Ministry, used for a section of the records of the AA.

VjZ Vierteljahrshefie für Zeitgeschichte.
Major journal published by the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.

ZS Zeugenschrifttum. Depositions by witnesses, a collection at the Institute for Contemporary History.

ZSg. Zeitgeschichtssammlung. Collection on recent history. A designation for several collections of papers at the German Federal Archive.

INTRODUCTION

Although this book contains a chapter on the background of World War II, it defines that war as beginning in 1939 in Europe. While some have argued that the war was merely a continuation of World War I after a temporary interruption created by the armistice of 1918, and that the whole period from 1914 to 1945 should be seen as the age of a new European civil war, a Thirty-one Years War if you will, such a perspective ignores not only the very different origins and nature of the prior conflict but obscures instead of illuminating the special character of the second one. If an important by-product of both wars was the weakening of Europe and its hold on the world, the
intentions
of the belligerents were fundamentally different. It is true that these changed somewhat in the course of each of these lengthy struggles, but a basic differentiation remains.

In World War I, the two sides were fighting over their relative roles in the world, roles defined by possible shifts in boundaries, colonial possessions, and military and naval power. It is true that the Austro–Hungarian empire anticipated the elimination of Serbia’s independent status, and Germany very quickly came to the conclusion that Belgium would never regain its independence, but beyond this expected disappearance of two of the smaller states which had emerged from larger constructions during the nineteenth century, the other powers–and most especially the major ones–were all expected to survive, even if trimmed by the winners. In this sense, the war, however costly and destructive in its
methods,
was still quite traditional in its aims.

It is also true that the fighting itself, with its unprecedented casualties, its incredible costs, the appearance of such new weapons as poison gas, airplanes, tanks, and submarines, as well as vast shifts in world economic patterns, ended up completely transforming the pre-war world and doing so in ways that none of the belligerents had anticipated. The effects on winners and losers alike were colossal, and the pre-war world could not
be revived even if some made valiant and sometimes counter-productive efforts to do so. But neither side had either intended or preferred the massive changes which resulted from the ability of the modern state to utilize the social and mechanical technologies developed in the preceding two centuries to draw vast human and material resources out of their respective societies and employ them–and thereby use them up–in the cauldron of battle.

In World War II, all this was very different indeed. The
intent
was different from the start. A total reordering of the globe was at stake from the very beginning, and the leadership on both sides recognized this. The German dictator Adolf Hitler had himself explicitly asserted on May 23, 1939, that the war he intended would be not for the Free City of Danzig but for living space in the East; his Foreign Minister similarly assured Italy’s Foreign Minister that it was war, not Danzig, that Germany wanted. When Germany had conquered Poland and offered a temporary peace to Britain and France, those countries responded by making it clear, as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain explained, that there could be no agreement with a German government led by Hitler, a man who had regularly broken his promises. If Chamberlain, who has often been derided for allegedly not grasping the true nature of the National Socialist challenge, saw the issues so clearly, the historian decades later ought not to close his or her eyes to the reality of a very different war. This was, in fact, a struggle not only for control of territory and resources but about who would live and control the resources of the globe and which peoples would vanish entirely because they were believed inferior or undesirable by the victors.

It was in this way that the two wars which originated in Europe differed greatly from each other even if separated by only two decades, and it was also in this way that the European war which began in 1939 differed from those initiated by Japan in China in 1931 and 1937 and the one waged by Italy against Ethiopia in 1935–36. However grim for the participants, and especially for the Chinese and Ethiopians, those wars, too, belonged in a prior framework. Both the first and the second stages of Japan’s aggression against China were a resumption of a pattern of imperial expansion which Japan had initiated in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Designed to expand its resource and power base at the expense of China, these efforts looked to the expansion of Japanese power, not the disappearance of China–to say nothing of the total disappearance of the Chinese.

Similarly, Italy’s invasion and occupation of Ethiopia was the last of a series of European wars for the control of portions of the African continent, a colonial war in the tradition of earlier seizures of African
territory by the Spanish and Portuguese, British and French, Dutch and Belgians, Germans and the Italians themselves. It is for this reason that the account of war offered in this work begins with the German attack on Poland, not the prior fighting in East Asia or Africa. Those other struggles would become merged with the one that began on September 1, 1939, but they had begun quite independently of it and would have remained both separate and different had not Germany launched a new type of war which came to absorb them.

The focus of this book, therefore, is on the war initiated by Germany in September 1939. It attempts to cover it until the defeat of Germany and those who became its associates, and since these came to include Japan, until that country’s surrender in 1945 as well. The fighting of that war ranged and raged over all the oceans, including even the Arctic ones, and touched every continent. Although most of the combat occurred in Europe, Asia, and Africa, such Australian cities as Darwin were repeatedly bombed and the Western Hemisphere was subjected not only to Japanese invasion in the north but to a silent assault by thousands of balloons carrying incendiaries and explosives to the western parts of Canada and the United States. It was, therefore, a war which reached further around the globe than any which had ever preceded it.

Furthermore, the extent of destruction was very much greater, and spread over vastly larger areas, than in any prior war, while the loss of life was at least twice that of the war of 1914–18. Contemporaries of that earlier struggle were so impressed by its destructiveness of both life and property, as well as by the vast lands and populations it engulfed, that they had quite early come to call it “The Great War,” a name by which its survivors recalled it when they did not instead refer to it as “The World War.” Both by comparison with that terrible event, and when set against all other wars of which we have any knowledge, the second world-wide conflagration of this century surely deserves to be called “The Greatest War.” Only an all-out nuclear war could ever be yet greater, and there would presumably be no historian left alive to record it–to say nothing of any records for a reconstruction of its course.

The account offered here is designed to try to illuminate the war in all its major aspects and theaters, with particular attention to the major decisions and choices made by the participants. There has, therefore, been little room for the details of combat on land and in the struggles for control of the skies and the seas. The emphasis is on the why? rather than the how? of war. If some incidents, like the fight over Madagascar or the campaign in Burma, receive more attention here than might be expected, this is precisely because they have been neglected in most broader surveys of the war. A deliberate attempt has been made to allot
to the terrible fighting on the Eastern Front the attention it deserves in the framework of the war as a whole; and if the resulting account is still not as lengthy and detailed as the role of that front in the over-all picture of the war merits, it is still very much more extensive than in other Western surveys.

Similarly, an effort has been made to integrate the use of intelligence into the narrative of policies and operations and to try to relate the events in widely separated parts of the globe to each other. This has meant some rapid shifting of geographic focus within individual chapters, but the processes of a world-wide conflict do not always lend themselves to easy dissection into conveniently separated narratives. It has, nevertheless, seemed useful to draw together in special chapters discussion of the evolution of new weapons and procedures during the whole war, and to survey the fate of the belligerents in the throes of hostilities. A certain amount of duplication is inevitable between the two thematic chapters and the chronological account, but it may be found helpful to have some material both integrated into the record of the war and that of nations and their weapons.

Certain peculiarities of the text call for explanation. I have decided to use the old rather than the new spelling of Chinese personal and place names; all contemporary maps and records use them, and the substitution of the spelling introduced in the I970s will only lead to useless searching in much of the existing literature. For Japanese names, the Japanese sequence, which places the family name first, is used at all times except only where the title of a book or article includes it in the reverse order. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. There is a certain arbitrariness in the utilization of place names which have changed as a result of territorial and other changes stemming from the war. As a general rule, the names used at the time will be found in this book; that is certainly in no way to be taken as a reflection on the propriety of subsequent boundaries. References to “England” may in some cases be interpreted as meaning the whole of Britain.

Two types of annotations have been separately marked and printed. Those which relate directly to the text and should be read with it have been marked by letters in the text and are located at the bottom of the page. Notes which are of a more technical nature are marked with numerals and are printed at the end of the book. These contain references to archival documents, discussion of and references to secondary literature, and they occasionally deal with controversial issues of interpretation and other related questions. For both footnotes and endnotes there is a list of abbreviations and special terms on pp. xvii–xix.

It has not seemed either sensible or useful to include a detailed bibliography, which would necessarily provide literally thousands of items. Anyone who works on World War II will be inclined to believe that the prophet Koheleth in asserting that “of making many books there is no end” must have been looking ahead to that event. All works directly cited in the notes have been provided with full citations the first time they appear. The bibliographic essay is designed to provide the interested reader with some of the most important works, in some instances with my comments. Such a listing cannot possibly be exhaustive; it may, however, both point to relevant literature and provide additional references through the bibliographies contained in most of the books concerned.

It has, similarly, seemed to me pointless to append a list of the thousands of archival folders and rolls of microfilm which have been scrutinized in the preparation of this book. Specific archival references will be found in the notes wherever this is appropriate, and a very short discussion of the archives is included in the bibliographic essay. Only those who have themselves toiled in the vast and often confusing records of the war can have a sense of the extent to which the scholar is dependent on the “kindness of strangers.” I can attest for the benefit of any readers, who may be tempted by reading this account to work in the records themselves, that those strangers quickly become valued friends.

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FROM ONE WAR TO ANOTHER